Hey guys I am new to GPU Computing, I will be using AMD opteron processor and AMD firepro W8100 GPU. I am in a dilemma of whether choosing Windows Operating System or Ubuntu to do GPU computing? Tell me why should I choose it.

as far as driver support they do have more. so lets look back to 1 year ago when everyone cried there is no drivers for win 10 and crap didnt work. and everyone had to buy new crap. so was it fixed or not. i dont think so.

To add to rebelyell's response, it also depends on the scope of your project and your resources. You're working with an Opteron which is great to experiment with virtualization if you decided to go that route - this would give you both Windows/Linux or BSD as a base. I'm sure you've also looked into AMD's own open-source tools and libraries (http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/ ) which work on both Windows and Linux so again, it depends on your scope and what you're comfortable with. If you're just starting out, I'd recommend spending time with both environments to give them a fair evaluation.

General computing with GPGPU is an interesting thing, in order to get in touch with it, you'd better decide what kinds of development tools you want to use, and programme for what first of all. For AMD GPGPU you have only one interface to programme with, OpenCL, most Linux distros and Windows support such programming. But for the driver support and development tools qualities, I suggest you to choose Microsoft Windows, but it provides you the best driver support and outstanding free development tools, such as Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition. As a workstation, you could choose the Windows 10 Education, that might be a good choice with a fair price comparing with Windows 10 Pro and Home.

i tend to agree with mr.unknown .. the only thing i frown on is win 10 with so many isues, and the issues with the 480 cards drivers and 290 cards on win 10. im win 7 not budging. if it was 2 or maybe 3 years from now linux should be basically top shelf ready.. but for now... eeeh windows.

linux out performs windows in gaming with correct setup but not with vm gaming.

now if you run vm on linux you run into other issues

windows 7 out performs windows 10 in gaming, most likely due to win 7 having less garbage running inside or svchost.exe sucking on internet which uses more cpu and ram to process the interrupts of the all the packets.

Realistically, in most build environments you shouldn't have much of a bottleneck around the OS. Things to keep in mind as mentioned before are availability of (optimized) drivers. There are kernel/OS side optimizations you can customize based on your needs/skills.

I agree with whiskey-foxtrot . if it was me i would just grab windows and get on with it. unless you want a hobby for months and months even years to do what you want to do. windows isnt going to suck the life out of your mission here.

i wish you would just say i want to bit coin mine and looking to make as much as possible... then i would say grab a server board and download freebsd and setup up your sever since linux base has so much to offer on server options.